The opioid epidemic is killing Americans at a horrifying rate, yet the federal government continues to ignore cannabis as a viable alternative to prescription pharmaceuticals.

A report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released today paints a treacherous image of the country’s continued struggle with prescription and narcotic opioids, as American life expectancy declined in 2016 for the second consecutive year — an alarming trend that officials credit almost entirely to a 21% rise in opioid-fueled drug overdoses.

According to the Washington Post, the two-year drop in American life expectancy is the first such trend since 1962-63 when a widespread flu strain wreaked havoc in the States. Since then, only one other year has seen Americans on the whole shed years off their lives: a 1993 anomaly credited to the emergence of AIDS.

That increase was so significant that the rise in overdose deaths entirely offset a slight decrease in America’s leading cause of death, heart disease.

“I think we should take it very seriously,” said Bob Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the National Center for Health Statistics (an agency of the CDC) to the Post. “If you look at the other developed countries in the world, they’re not seeing this kind of thing. Life expectancy is going up.”

In the U.S., though, the new statistics report that life expectancy dropped by one tenth of year in 2016, from 78.7 years to 78.6. Separated by gender, the overdose epidemic is significantly affecting men, with male life expectancy dropping by two tenths of year, from 76.3 years to 76.1, while women’s overall expectancy held steady at 81.1 years.

“It’s even worse than it looks,” said Keith Humphreys, an addiction specialist at Stanford University to the Post. “We could easily be at 50,000 opioid deaths last year. This means that even if you ignored deaths from all other drugs, the opioid epidemic alone is deadlier than the AIDS epidemic at its peak.”

Even from within the federal government, the White House-funded National Institute on Drug Addiction published an in-house study on their website last May that “Found an association between medical marijuana legalization and a reduction in overdose deaths from opioid pain relievers, an effect that strengthened in each year following the implementation of legislation.”

Still, politicians across the country, including President Trump and his anti-cannabis Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have all but ignored that data, choosing instead to focus on arresting heroin dealers and closing borders, a plan that has so far done nothing to stop opioid-related deaths.

And while a number of liberal politicians and Trump’s own Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis have pleaded for emergency funding to fight the addiction epidemic, those same officials have largely remained mute about, or even spoken up against, using cannabis as an alternative to opioid treatment.

Patrick Kennedy, a former Democratic congressman and the founder of anti-cannabis lobbying group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, has instead continued to take a page from Sessions’ playbook, equating cannabis use with opioid addiction, while claiming that the only viable solution rests in pharmaceutical opioid receptor inhibitors.

In a conversation with the Post, Kennedy decried “a bias in recovery circles” that rejects those medications, but failed to mention his own unfounded bias against medicinal cannabis.

With no light yet shining from the end of the tunnel, American politicians will first have to get over their own personal prejudice before any real change can be made. As for 2017, the damage has already been done, but we’ll have to wait until next year to see the statistics, with CDC experts already predicting that life expectancy will decline for the third consecutive year.

“My guess is that when all of the data are in that the [2017] trend line will be at least as steep as for 2016, if not steeper,” Anderson said.

published on December 21, 2017

Zach Harris

Zach Harris is a writer based in Philadelphia whose work has appeared on Noisey, First We Feast, and Jenkem Magazine. You can find him on Twitter @10000youtubes complaining about NBA referees.